The New Google Analytics: Dashboards

Google Analytics has proven itself to be a popular and powerful tool over the past few years. This free service is currently in use at over half of the most popular 10,000 websites, generating massive amounts of statistical data. On March 23, Google announced on its Analytics blog that the new version of Google Analytics will soon be available in beta to more users.

As the first in a series intended to highlight the new features of Google Analytics, the March 23 post concentrated on the changes the user is likely to notice first – changes in the Dashboard itself. Users will soon find that the entire Dashboard has been completely redesigned and features customizable widgets. In addition to this added power, up to 20 customized dashboards can be created per profile.

The new Dashboard in Analytics will be completely based on widgets from categories including Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. These distinct visualizations of the raw data can be arranged via a drag-and-drop customizing interface to present users with the information most relevant to them.

Using this flexibility across multiple Dashboards will give users the power to craft tools personalized for their specific reporting needs. Suggested options mentioned by Google in their post include a Dashboard dedicated to website content and a Dashboard focusing on search engine optimization efforts.

These changes to Google Analytics will provide users with more streamlined access to visitor data and the tools to creatively view this data in the form that it will be most useful to their efforts. This promising upgrade to an already powerful tool for online marketing research is already available to a small segment of Google Analytics users and will gradually be rolled out to more users as new functionality is added.